


tradition

by BlackSclera



Category: Bleach
Genre: Blood and Violence, Body Horror, Gen, Implied/Referenced Cannibalism, Murder
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-01
Packaged: 2021-03-11 08:09:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,114
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28468056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackSclera/pseuds/BlackSclera
Summary: No one talks about the Kurosaki family.At least not in broad daylight or plain sight where their precious twins could overhear
Comments: 8
Kudos: 14





	1. yuzu and karin

**Author's Note:**

> another indulgent thing to try and get myself back into writing again

No one talks about the Kurosaki family. At least not in broad daylight or plain sight where their precious twins could overhear.

The two are hardly seen without the other, hands intertwined as they walk home with an eerie lack of life in their eyes. Yuzu, so very much like their late mother with a chilling smile that gives nothing she didn’t want away and a proficiency with the knife that extended past their kitchen’s walls, and Karin, whose laziness masked a spitfire temper that rivalled that of her older brother’s and whose legs are littered with bruises but never scars. A hobby, some would say despite being fully aware that soccer training doesn’t leave imprints that look like they have been repeatedly brutalized with a crowbar. There within a day, gone within the next, and no one asks.

(Those with a keener eye look at the teenager with long auburn hair and laughter like windchimes who sometimes visits the Kurosaki clinic on their busier days. She isn’t one of _them_ , not the Kurosaki with the repressed violence that clung to their every step and breath, but she is one of _theirs_ and that is incentive enough to grit their teeth and swallow the words. They would be a fool not to.)

They wander the streets with faux childlike innocence and Karakura holds their breaths in hopes of silencing the sound of terror fluttering about in their throats. The twins are, after all, not without normality; they are courteous and polite if it has been earned and if they are treated with such, but they are Kurosaki’s _judgment_. They do not have kindness to spare for those who have wronged them and their family or the long-standing traditions of Karakura. Mercy is a passing acquaintance they will never meet twice.

_It was Karin who noticed him one sunny morning, the blue of the sky gratingly vivid and the wind pleasantly chill, sticking out and reeking of an outsider as he crept behind them on their way to school. She could tell he wasn’t one of theirs. Far too skittish, the bend of his back too deep and his eyes too intent on what little skin showed beneath Yuzu’s skirt. Most of all, it’s the way he makes the mistake of looking at them and thinking they are prey._

_Perhaps in any other town, authorities would be called and adults would step in. The man isn’t very subtle in his pursuits - his lurking bulk of a frame by the school gates is hard to ignore – but most especially not in a place so attuned to anomalies that differ from what they know as law._

_However, Karakura isn’t like any other town. Kurosaki’s children do not need protecting._

_“Good morning,” Karin greets._

_The man jumps before delight crosses his face and he enthusiastically nods at them with a wide, wobbly grin. “Good morning, Karin-chan, Yuzu-chan.”_

_The twins return his smile. They do not ask how he knows their names._

_That day, it is Isshin who picks his daughters up after school._

_(There is one less man in Karakura, and the splatter of red adorning the floors of the Kurosaki’s family clinic and the dinner Yuzu serves with a smile has everything to do with it.)_

Within Karakura, the twins are the judge. Isshin is their executor.

And Kurosaki’s firstborn – Ichigo whose knuckles are perpetually stained red, who tracked bloodstains with his every step, leaving shattered bodies in his wake - is the law.


	2. ichigo

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ichigo grew up despising violence.

He grew up clinging to his mother’s fingers, tears pouring from his eyes and face flushing fiercely from shame, utterly helpless when it came to anything that involved hurting people and even more when it came to protecting them. He was far too soft even on his uncut edges, too kind to raise his fist when he’s being pushed around and spat on. A bleeding heart that he wore ungracefully in the shallow depth of his sleeves.

_“He isn’t like you,” a man whose eyes are shadowed by his bucket hat tells Masaki. He is careful to keep his distance from the center of the room where she stands. Well within her territory, he isn’t any different from the body she is carving open on the table with an amiable smile._

_She laughs. Her victim eerily echoes it with a panicked whistle, the only sound she can make after Masaki had sealed her mouth shut and dug a hole into her neck._

_“You disapprove.” Her eyes are filled with mirth as she regards him over her shoulder. Even with part of her attention diverted, her hands do not stop moving. “You don’t find it agreeable that he is the one to inherit my ring, do you, Urahara?”_

_“Ichigo is too soft.” Limbs thrash as Masaki’s hand twists, short one arm and another cut at the ankle. His expression sours as he hears a fluttering wheeze. No anesthesia._

_“He is kind,” she agrees. “That doesn’t make him weak.”_

_“What exactly does that make him if not unfit for your inheritor?”_

_Masaki gently traces a line down the gaping abdomen of the woman, her smile motherly as her fingers bumped down each bare rib. She is a feast for the eyes, naked flesh crowned by the white of her bones, organs pulsing still with life and glistening wetly under the fluorescent light._

_“It makes him dangerous.”_

It’s Tatsuki Arisawa who would make up for everything that Ichigo isn’t, baring her teeth in anger, unhesitating to pound her fists into the vulnerable areas of their throats when they stare too long at Ichigo with poorly disguised malicious intent. She becomes a constant presence in his life, her hand gently intertwined with his and daring those that open their mouths in obvious ridicule with a harsh grin.

It was normal then, they thought; just children being children, teasing that held no real malice even if they left a couple of bruises and scratches, an experience that desensitized adults would think very little of, even more now that Tatsuki had taken it upon herself to become young Ichigo’s little protector. 

There was no need for concern or intervention, some presumed, but those who knew what the ring on Masaki’s finger meant firmly remember that ‘Tatsuki Arisawa’ had crawled out of the Kurosaki’s basement alive. 

The rest of Karakura discovers this for themselves when Tatsuki drags one of their classmates by her hair and repeatedly slams hear head against the wall until she stopped screaming. Blood smeared the wall where the skin of her face tore open. Without pause or remorse, Tatsuki shakes a few hairs from her fingers and makes a move to reach for one of the chairs before Ichigo stops her.

“T-Tatsuki!” 

She flexes her fists in response, a not-quite defiance. “She insulted your mother, Ichigo.”

He quietly watches as Tatsuki twists her fingers into the front of her shirt where her surgical scars hide underneath. He was there the night his mother brought a young girl home, metal wirings piercing through her frail little body, entrails spilling out of her like red ribbons. It was his hands that held her skin and flesh together as his mother put her back piece by piece.

Then, much softer, she says, “besides, you think she deserves this too, right?"

Ichigo shakes his head, tears spilling from his eyes as the teachers hastened to call for a doctor. He kneels by their unconscious classmate with shaking fingers.

_(“Ichigo is kind. That doesn’t make him weak.”)_

“That’s not for you to decide,” he murmurs as the ambulance arrives minutes later. 

Fortunately, their classmate recovers within a few weeks. But when she returns, she does so without a scar and a smile that doesn’t quite sit right on her unmarred face. 

“You are… Kurosaki Ichigo-kun, right?” she asks.

Ichigo blinks up at her. Beside him, Tatsuki spins a pencil between her fingers, eyes dangerously intent on the space where she remembers seeing the skin tear. Not even a shadow of a bruise.

“I wanted to thank you. The doctors said you saved me.” She taps the side of her head with her knuckles and a peal of lighthearted laughter. “That and my really hard head. Ah, I haven’t introduced myself yet, have I?”

Tucking a few strands of her hair behind her ear, she offers a hand. The light catches the blue hairclips she has adorning the side of her hair.

“My name is Orihime Inoue. It’s nice to meet you.”

_(“It makes him dangerous.”)_

-

Ichigo grew up despising violence. 

Unfortunately for him and everyone around him, it chases the soles of his feet and vows its loyalty, devotes its very existence to keep him company like the ringing that accompanies every too loud silence.

It is there when his father teaches him how to use a scalpel on a man that has appeared in the local newspapers; he had lasted two days – _bled too much, too fast, careless incisions and infected amputations, Ichigo, this wouldn’t do_ \- and Ichigo is careful not to make the same mistakes on the second person Isshin brings home. 

It breathes down his neck as his mother leads him to the clinic with gloves painted a red so dark it appears black on the night of his birthday. It holds his hand as he raises a knife over his head, his gloves squeaking around the handle, his eyes more gold than brown, laughter threatening to burst from his lips. His mother had kissed his forehead after, the biting scent of disinfectants clinging heavily to their skins, body bag carefully set up against the wall behind them so Yuzu can reach it easier.

But it wasn’t until he witnesses the bullets split his mother’s skull open and rip holes into her chest on their way home that Ichigo welcomes violence as his _own_. 

_Urahara would solemnly lower his head years later, his hat pressed into his chest and eyes unobscured. It is the most vulnerable he had allowed himself in the presence of a killer._

_“We didn’t make it. We could have stopped it, but we didn’t make it.”_

_Ichigo steps near him, head tilting to study the expression on Urahara’s face. He reeks of blood and the stench of human meat._

_“You failed and now you’re hoping that I will give you what she was never able to give you while she was still alive,” he realizes, eyes glimmering gold. “And it’s not forgiveness you’re asking for.”_

_Urahara keeps his eyes lowered. The hat crumples under his grip._

_“No,” Ichigo continues, “you want punishment. You want proof on your skin that you have repented for what you weren’t able to do. You want it to hurt because everyone you’ve done wrong can’t touch you. You’re too smart for them. But I’m different. I have the authority. If I will you to, you would gladly kneel.”_

_Ichigo smiles, smiles, **smiles**. He knows he’s right. Urahara doesn’t have a single scar to call his, but everything Kurosaki claimed did. Tatsuki and her surgical scars, Inoue and the fracture on her skull she refused to heal. Chad’s whole right arm was a shade lighter than the rest of his body, and his shoulder is marked with the reattachment surgery. Uryu had the shape of a cross carved at the side of his neck which he hid with high-collared shirts._

_“But in the end, it’s about you. You don’t care about the family she left behind. Did you honestly think punishment will make you a better person? You’re rotten to the core, Urahara.”_

_He lifts his hand at waist-level. Urahara moves to kneel, his face pale and sweat dotting the line of his neck. An outsider twice over, an exile. There is no place for him but here where he swears his life to monsters with the face of humans._

_“My mother,” Ichigo mutters into the heavy silence as Urahara ghosts his lips over the ring on his finger, “she’d given you the same answer when you asked, didn’t she?”_

_Urahara tries not to remember the night he’d told Masaki that her son is nothing like her. She laughed then and he didn’t understand why._

_He was wrong. He knows that now._

_His silence to his question is answer enough._

Karakura finds the body. The authorities avoided the street where he hung, skin loosely flapping with the wind and blood drying until the next morning, and the townspeople are still and quiet as they waited for the day to pass in coldblooded trepidation. 

Everyone had seen it, after all. Crudely carved into what skin remained of the lower half of his face, curving into an almost smile.

_Father,_ it had read.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i kind of want to draw smth for this story but i dont know what ; ; im going to try n get some sleep goobnight


End file.
